Cops

Except for a select few, most politicians are silent as the proverbial grave. In positions of power, they are powerless in the face of this civilized, legalized barbarity. They are Black politicians who possess only the office: none of the Power. They have nothing to say. They nave even less to do. Faced with the enormity of death, politics is notoriously silent when it really comes to protecting the people, or restraining the forces of the state: They don't run the police; the police run them into silent acquiescence.

In an age of right-wing resurgence, and lock - 'em up, throw-away-the-key criminal justice policies, where are the voices of let the "punishment fit the crime?"

How man voices arc clamoring for the death penalty? Where are the editorials calling for his prosecution "to the fullest extent of the law"?

At best, there are feeble pleas that he be "suspended", or , at best, "fired".

Didn't Donta Dawson lose whatever job he had? Doesn't everyone who goes to jail? From those who have made a career of being "tough on crime", this is one offense that they have all but ignored.

For, it is not a crime when the cops kill-it is their JOB.

Their job is legalized terrorism of the poor, the impoverished, the anti- established, the powerless. They are protectors of the raging class divide in America. If they behaved in the suburbs the way they did in the ghettoes, millions of Americans would be looking to revolution as the solution. In truth, they perform differently in different sections of society, for they perform different functions for different segments of society. What the brilliant revolutionary psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon once wrote of colonial Algeria, applies to oppressed societies all around the world, a world cut in twain;

The dividing line, the frontiers are shown by barracks and police stations. In the colonies it is the policeman and the soldier who are the officinal, instituted go-betweens, the spokesmen of the settler and his rule of oppression... In the capitalist countries a multitude of moral teachers, counselors and "bewilders" separate the exploited from those in power. In the colonial countries, on the contrary, the policeman and the soldier, by their immediate presence aid their frequent and direct action maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle-butts and napalm not to budge.